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Hey People: Diagnoses are Nouns not Adjectives

As I have written about before, language usage is important when considering how disabled people are viewed and portrayed in society. While I personally prefer to not use person first language, there is one situation where the person should always come first. This is when an actual diagnosis is being discussed. I will demonstrate:

Person with Cerebral Palsy

Person with Down Syndrome

Person with Spina Bifida

and so on.

This should be self evident because both the word person and the diagnosis are nouns, and yet this simple grammatical concept is to complicated for a lot of people. Today, I read this. The headline reads

Kiwi expat family take cerebal palsy son’s discrimination case to UN

What the fuck? Cerebral Palsy is a noun, it is the name of a medical diagnosis. It is not now nor has it ever been an adjective. It can’t even be made into one as Autism can be made into autistic (most autistic people are totally fine with being called autistic but people with other diagnoses that can be made into descriptors like Schizophrenia really hate it and you should all respect that).

This is far from the first time, I have seen this severe lapse in grammar. It often happens to people with Down Syndrom2 for example here and here. Bless Google for knowing this is terrible. while I was searching for the examples, I knew were plentiful, my top results were for articles with correct person first phrases “man with Down Syndrome” or “child with down syndrome”. Even so, it didn’t take much scrolling before I found examples of the offending phrases. To add insult to injury, the second example is a story about a young man with Down’s who was killed by police. Even in death he can’t have his humanity recognized

By trying to turn a noun into an adjective, you are going to both fail and give that noun precedence of place. By putting it before the person you are giving it ownership of that person and denying their humanity and individuality. So in future check your grammar and remember that diagnoses are not descriptions of people but are things that people have.